How To Make A Copy Of A Word Document- Backup Tips

Backups are our lifelines in today’s digital age. We hold almost all our important data within the confines of our computers, including our crucial Word documents. Therefore, it is paramount to know how to make a copy of a Word document and learn techniques for effective backups. This article provides an insightful deep dive into the nitty-gritty of creating Word document copies for backup purposes.

Tips for Copying Word Documents

Creating duplicates of your Word documents serves as a primary backup solution, shielding you from unexpected data loss. You might be a student having an important thesis or a working professional with crucial documents; everyone needs an extra layer of safety. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Open the Word document you want to copy.
2. Navigate to the File menu.
3. Click on ‘Save As’. Choose the location to save your copy.
4. Type a new name for the document to distinguish it from the original one and click ‘Save’.

While this is a common practice, many forget that it could spawn a ‘Document Management Challenge’ when dealing with multiple versions. Therefore, keeping track of versions efficiently with understandable naming conventions or utilizing version controls in Word is also important.

Backup Tips – Crucial & Effective

Leveraging Cloud services such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox is another smart move for backing up Word documents. The cloud offers a huge storage space, making it easier to keep multiple duplicates and versions.

Automating Word Document Backup

No matter how cautious people are, they can forget to back up their documents. Luckily, technology has a solution to this: automating backups. Here’s how you can enable auto back up in Word:

1. Go to ‘File’ > ‘Options’.
2. Click on ‘Save’ in the left panel.
3. Check the ‘Save AutoRecover information every X minutes’ box and put the desired backup frequency in the minutes field (usually 10 minutes).
4. Further down, check the ‘Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving’ box.

With this turned on, Word will automatically save a copy of your document at the set interval, creating an automatic backup.

External Hard Drives and Flash Drives

An external hard drive or a flash drive can be another great backup option. It provides ample storage space and can be kept separate from your computer, thus protecting the backup copies if your PC falls prey to a virus or a malware attack.

Backup Services

Backup services like Carbonite or Backblaze also offer comprehensive backup solutions. These third-party tools are designed for systematic, consistent backups done on set schedules. They can automatically backup all your Word documents (and other files) periodically.

According to a study by Backblaze on Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2021, the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) was just 0.29%, highlighting the reliability of these backup services.

No matter how you choose to back up your Word documents, the most important tip is to make it a habit and stick with it. Remember, it’s better to have multiple copies of your documents than to lose an important document with no backup available.

Be data smart, stay backed up!